Suggestion Saturday: September 25, 2010

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Here is this week’s list of blog posts, photos, documentaries and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Cultural-Mythologies. When I was a Christian I was deeply frustrated with how reluctant the institution of Christianity was to listen to or learn from what we referred to as secular society.

Most people tend to think that mythologies only exist in the past, from distant ancient – and usually extinct – civilizations. Mythologies exist in every culture. They are how a society communicates. Literature, movies, music, nearly all forms or art & entertainment reflect the current culture’s – society’s – understandings, philosophy, loves, concerns, and fears. To embrace the insular, or isolationism, is to disconnect from these numerous and various richnesses of art & entertainment; it is to disconnect with society.

Suffer the Little Children. If you have a spare hour this weekend watch this heartbreaking 1968 documentary about the Pennhurst State School. I did not realize that children with even mild developmental delays or physical handicaps were institutionalized so recently in our history.

If I had to pick a label: Agnostic. Certain questions are just too big for the human brain in my opinion. Maybe there’s something G/god-ish out there, maybe there isn’t. It is a fascinating question to mull over but I don’t think it’s possible to know for sure either way.

No…. actually, now that I think ’bout it, I wouldn’t consider myself an Agnostic.
I’m actually writing a (potentially semi-large) piece that touches upon and talks about this other state of ‘belief’.

I’ve never liked the idea of a dichotic scale with Theism on one end and Atheism on the other. (With Agnosticism – ‘I don’t know, I don’t care, I can’t know’ – in various shades of gray inbetween. There is another option.

A friend of mine in England is publishing a book and several authors penning each ‘chapter’ and I’ve been asked to be one of them. This piece I’m working on will (hopefully) be one of the ‘chapters’.